Umbrella Man (9786167611204)

by Needham, Jake

“Maybe not for you, but it is for me. I don’t even know if he’s in Singapore anymore.”

  “He is.”

  “How do you know that?”

  There was no answer.

  “Okay,” Tay went on, “even if I believe he is still here, I still don’t have a clue where to start looking for him.”

  “Then let me give you one. Find the best looking woman in Singapore and I’ll bet Vince won’t be more than twenty feet away.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Vince could never resist the ladies. He always had two or three stashed away somewhere. Lord, he spent money on them like he was printing it. Nothing but the best apartments, the best clothes…”

  And just like that Tay knew.

  “Mei Lin Lee,” he said.

  “Is that a question?” the voice asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Good. I’m tired of giving you all the answers. From here on, Samuel, you’re on your own.”

  So that was why the Paraguas Ltd safety deposit box was at HSBC. That was who was paying for Mei Lin’s elaborate apartment. That was why Mei Lin had that peculiar look he had noticed in her eyes every time he asked about the safety box and the man who was signing in for access under the name Joseph Hysmith.

  But why would Mei Lin finger Ferrero to Tay simply because he asked her to? Wouldn’t she have lied to protect him? He would have to ask her about that. He’d bet it was a good story.

  ***

  “Thank you, Mother.”

  No response.

  “Are you still there, Mother?”

  Silence.

  “Were you ever there, Mother?”

  Silence.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” Tay shouted at the banana trees. “I’ve been sitting her like an absolute idiot and talking to myself this whole time, haven’t I? There was never anyone there at all!”

  Tay’s cell telephone rang. He had forgotten he had left it lying on the table next to his chair, and it startled him. His phone almost never rang, not even in the afternoon or evening, and this was the middle of the night. He eyed it suspiciously for a moment, then he snatched it off the table and punched the answer button.

  “Hello?”

  But there was no one there.

  He listened to the empty buzz of the dial tone and after a moment he very slowly hung up and returned the telephone to the table.

  ***

  For what might have been five minutes or forty-five minutes, Tay sat there in the dark of his garden without moving. There was no wind and the silence was nearly absolute. Once he thought he heard a car pass somewhere far away, but he might have been mistaken.

  Eventually he gave up listening to the darkness, and he stood up, stretched, and looked over at the banana trees from where he thought he had heard the voice.

  “Good night, Mother,” he said.

  Then he turned away, went inside, locked the French doors behind him, and climbed the stairs to bed.

  The banana trees, they said nothing at all.

  FORTY-THREE

  THE NEXT MORNING, Tay took a small kitchen ladder out to his garden and opened it up. He pushed some banana trees aside and sat it next to the back wall. He felt like a fool doing it, but he did it anyway.

  The ladder was just tall enough to allow him to scramble over the wall and drop into the narrow alleyway behind his house. From there he walked out to Hullet Road and then west to Cairnhill Road where he almost immediately found a taxi.

  Tay had no idea if ISD still had him under surveillance or not. Goh had denied it, of course, but then what else was he going to do? Regardless, Tay saw no reason to take a chance. If ISD was there, they would be set up somewhere out on Emerald Hill Road waiting for him to emerge from his front gate. Tay was pretty certain it would never have occurred to them he might make his morning departure over the garden wall instead. Until today, it had never occurred to him either.

  ***

  Tay told the cab driver to drop him on Farrer Road just in front of St. Margaret’s School. Crossing over the busy thoroughfare on a pedestrian bridge, he turned right on Woollerton Park Road and strolled slowly toward Gallop Green. The road dead-ended directly into the security gate at Gallop Green so that approach gave him the longest possible view of Mei Lin’s apartment complex without hanging around outside in the street and being painfully obvious about it.

  And he figured he needed all the time he could get.

  Because he didn’t have a bloody clue what he was going to do when he got there.

  ***

  To Tay’s astonishment, he caught a break.

  He was about a hundred yards from the guardhouse at Gallop Green’s security gate, an odd little structure that looked to Tay like a glassed-in mushroom, when one of the guards came out, slipped a light-colored cotton jacket over his uniform shirt, and began walking up the street directly toward Tay.

  Keeping the same meandering pace, Tay turned left into the driveway of a house set back from the road where the gates had been conveniently left open. With the odd glance back over his shoulder, he walked slowly toward the house trying hard to look as innocent as he possibly could. After the guard passed the foot of the driveway, Tay turned around, walked back out to Woollerton Park Road, and followed the guard at a distance of about a hundred feet.

  And the breaks just kept on coming.

  The guard walked straight up to Farrer Road and went into a restaurant on the corner that appeared to cater to locals. Like a lot of similar places in Singapore, it was unairconditioned and open to the street on two sides, shielded from the sun and rain only by wide aluminum awnings painted bright blue. The guard settled himself at a table by the sidewalk and lit a cigarette. Tay walked a bit more slowly and watched the guard give his order to an elderly woman in a shapeless gray dress.

  As soon as the woman left the table, Tay went straight to the table and seated himself on an orange plastic chair opposite the guard. Giving the man his very best dead-eyed look, he removed a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and lit one without taking his eyes off the man.

  Tay took a deep draw on his cigarette, and leaned forward slightly. “I’m from ISD,” he said. He kept his voice low and tried to imbue it with a certain degree of menace.

  When Tay saw the frightened-rabbit look in the man’s eyes, he almost laughed out loud.

  A bus rolled past, its engine grinding noisily, which gave Tay a chance to get himself under control. The ISD thing was becoming intoxicating. He had been a policeman for a long time and had never before experienced the kind of response he got from people by simply muttering those three initials. If someone asked for identification, he figured he would just produce his CID warrant card and then put it away again before they got a careful look at it, but he knew that was unlikely to happen anyway. When confronted by a man identifying himself as being from the Internal Security Department, not one Singaporean in ten thousand would have the balls to do anything but tug on his forelock and lower his eyes.

  The guard was a dark-skinned older man who looked somewhat Indian. He was nearly bald with a deeply lined face and heavy brows. He didn’t have a forelock to tug, but he did lower his eyes.

  “I have some questions for you,” Tay said.

  The man nodded, but stayed silent.

  “How long have you worked at Gallop Green?”

  Tay saw the man’s Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed once, hard. Now he understood that Tay knew who he was. This wasn’t just some kind of random stop.

  “About six months, sir.”

  “Like your job?”

  The man nodded slowly. Tay could see him trying to work out what was coming.

  “Want to keep it?”

  Tay watched the Adam’s apple move up and down again.

  “Do you know Mei Lin Lee?”

  Tay could see in the man’s eyes his first thought was to deny it. In Tay’s experience, when asked a question like that by someone in authority, nearly everyo
ne’s first thought was to deny it. But then the man realized that, of course, Tay already knew he did or they wouldn’t be having this conversation.

  “I know who she is, sir.”

  “How about Mr. Lee. Do you know who he is?

  Now the man looked genuinely confused. “Mr. Lee?”

  “Her husband.”

  The elderly woman shuffled over and banged a bottle of Tiger beer on the table in front of the guard. She looked at Tay. He gave her his best version of a dead-eyed stare and said nothing. She gave it right back to him and shuffled away. Okay, Tay thought, maybe it doesn’t work on everyone.

  “There no Mr. Lee. No, sir. No Mr. Lee. Least not at Gallop Green.”

  “She’s not married?”

  “Don’t know, sir,” the guard said, but Tay thought he could see traces of something like a snicker around the corners of his mouth.

  Tay pulled out his telephone, located the photograph of Vincent Ferrero, and turned his phone so the guard could see it.

  “Do you know this man?”

  The guard licked his lips. Now he looked uncomfortable. The snicker, if it had ever been there, was long gone.

  “Who is he?”

  “The name on our list is Mr. Hysmith, but I don’t think that’s really—”

  “What list?”

  “The owners’ list, sir.”

  “This man owns an apartment at Gallop Green?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tay was certain he already knew what the answer to his next question would be, but he asked it anyway.

  “What apartment does Mr. Hysmith own?”

  The guard cleared his throat and looked away. “It’s D12. The unit where Ms. Lee lives.”

  Tay thought about that for a moment.

  “Is he there now?”

  “No, sir. He not come in long time. A week? Maybe two?”

  “But Mrs. Lee is there now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Tay leaned slowly across the table toward the security guard, gave him another dose of the dead-eyed stare he was getting pretty close to perfecting, and said, “I going to make a telephone call. You will not move from that chair until I return. Is that clear?”

  The man nodded quickly and Tay stood up, walked out to the sidewalk, and pretended to make a call. He had no one to call, of course, but he did need time to think.

  So now he knew for sure Vince Ferrero was keeping a beautiful woman in an expensive apartment. So bloody what?

  Tay was almost certain Ferrero killed Johnny the Mover, but he still had no idea why. Did Mei Lin know? Possibly, but he doubted it. She had been involved with Ferrero’s access to the safety box at the bank, that was true, but that didn’t make her his partner or his pal. She was probably his current punch and that was about it.

  Well, that was a little harsh Tay had to admit. Maybe he was just jealous of a man who could stash a beautiful woman in a five million dollar apartment and keep her there until he got tired of her. It was like keeping a pet, wasn’t it? A pet who gave blowjobs. Probably.

  So why had Mei Lin readily identified Ferrero as Mr. Hysmith when Tay had shown her the picture on his phone? All she had to do was say she didn’t recognize the man and that would have been that. Tay would have had no way left to connect up the dots.

  But Mai Lin had served Vince Ferrero up to him right on the proverbial platter. Why had she done that? He had no idea. None at all.

  ***

  When Tay returned to the table, the security guard was picking nervously at a pile of rice and something that looked like chicken curry.

  “What’s your name?” Tay asked the guard after sitting down again. He tried for a friendly tone of voice, but he was less good at that than he was at nastiness and he thought it came out sounding a little strangled.

  “Rahul, sir.”

  “Well, Rahul, here’s the deal. You and I never had this conversation. Is that clear?”

  The guard’s eyes darted nervously from side to side and the Adam’s apple went up and down.

  “If you do tell anyone, if either this man or this woman find out I asked you these questions,” Tay went on without waiting for an answer, “I will find out. I will see that you lose your job, and I will make certain other even more unpleasant things happen to you.”

  Tay could see Rahul trying to figure out what those more unpleasant things might be, which was okay with Tay, because he actually had no idea what he was talking about either.

  After a moment, looking suitably cowed and frightened, Rahul nodded quickly.

  “Are you on a meal break?”

  “No, sir. It is the end of my shift. After I eat, I will be going home.”

  “You will be going home now, Rahul. Forget the food. Get out of here.”

  The guard cast a disappointed look at the plate in front of him and the nearly full bottle of beer, but he nodded quickly again, then stood up and hurried away.

  Tay hated depriving a man of a meal, but he was going to have to go back to Gallop Green and have another talk with Mei Lin and he didn’t want Rahul anywhere in the neighborhood when he did. He had crawled way out on a limb with all this ISD stuff. The fewer people there were around who knew what he had been doing the happier he would be.

  FORTY-FOUR

  TAY WAS ABOUT halfway back to Gallop Green when the dark blue Mercedes with blacked-out windows stopped alongside him. The window slowly began to lower.

  Tay wasn’t armed, and he didn’t really expect somebody to shoot him in broad daylight right in the middle of one of the best neighborhoods in Singapore anyway. Regardless, he suddenly wished he had something better to defend himself with than his American Express card.

  Fleeing was always a possibility, of course, but he didn’t want to look like a fool, and he didn’t immediately see any effective way to do that as exposed as he was on the sidewalk of a residential neighborhood. So he just stood there and waited to see what was about to happen.

  John August leaned toward the open window.

  “Get in, Sam,” he said.

  “August?”

  August said nothing.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “You could have called me. I’ve tried to call you over and over and—”

  “Sam, just shut the fuck up and get in the car.”

  ***

  They drove out to Farrer Road, turned right, then continued in silence until they came to the Pan Island Expressway, which August entered heading west.

  “Where are we going?” Tay asked.

  “Nowhere. I just didn’t want to have a conversation with you standing there looking at me like I was about to shoot you.”

  “And are you?”

  “Not right away, but I’m not taking it off the table.”

  Tay nodded, said nothing. He just waited for August to tell him what was going on.

  “By the way,” August continued, “you’re clean.”

  “Clean?”

  “I mean nobody is following you. I wish I’d been around to see you crawling over your back fence this morning. That was so dumb it was brilliant.”

  Tay shrugged. “I didn’t want ISD to know where I was going.”

  “They wouldn’t. I don’t think they care. They haven’t been the ones following you.”

  Now August had Tay’s full attention.

  “And this you know exactly how?”

  August gave Tay a long look, certainly far longer than Tay thought appropriate while he was driving seventy miles-an-hour down a six-lane freeway filled with traffic.

  “I’m not just some guy, Tay. I get paid to know what’s going on.”

  “Who are you really, John? I know you used to be CIA. At least I think I know that. But I thought you were supposed to be retired. And yet you seem to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. You’re certainly not just a guy who owns a bar in Pattaya. Are you still CIA?”

  “That’s not the only possibility.”


  “Then you’re telling me you’re not CIA?”

  “It isn’t nearly that straightforward these days, Tay.”

  “I think it is. Let’s try it this way. I’ll go first. I’m a cop. In Singapore. I work for Singapore CID. Now…it’s your turn.”

  August looked over at Tay, once again Tay thought for rather longer than was either necessary or appropriate.

  “I used to be an intelligence officer,” August said after a moment. “I once worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. I have retired from the Central Intelligence Agency. Occasionally people ask me to do things for them. Sometimes it’s government agencies who ask, sometimes it’s individuals. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don’t. It wasn’t very long ago, Sam, that you asked me to do something for you as I recall, and I did it.”

  “So the CIA asks you to do things for them?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And you do them.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Is this one of those times?”

  “No. I’m just trying to help out a friend.”

  “Vince Ferrero?”

  August’s reaction to that wasn’t at all what Tay expected. He thought he would deny it, of course, make up some cockamamie story perhaps, but August looked genuinely startled at the idea.

  “Ferrero? What? No, Sam, I’m not here to help Ferrero.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m here to help you, Sam.”

  ***

  At the junction August moved over onto the Bukit Timah Expressway and sped up slightly. The BKE ran north to the Woodlands crossing point into Malaysia and Tay wondered if that was where August was taking him.

  “I don’t have my passport,” Tay said.

  “You don’t need it. We’re just driving. No place safer to talk than a moving car, if you’re sure it’s clean.”

  “And are you sure?”

  August didn’t respond, which was enough of an answer all by itself. They shifted into the right lane and blew by a line of cars patiently trailing behind a bus.

  “I’m going to ask you a favor, Sam.”

  Tay said nothing.

  “Forget about Johnny. He’s dead and nothing can change that. What’s more, I’ll tell you here and now it’s probably for the best.”